How To Speed Up And Optimize WordPress Sites In 2020

A powerful website performs efficiently on both speed and loading time to feature as a great website in 2020.

Normally, users prefer to browse a site with great page loading duration and remarkable content. To keep your WordPress Sites going, there are numerous techniques, tools, and plugins utilized by both marketers and bloggers to make their websites perform stunningly.

Here are some actionable tips that speed Up WordPress Sites and Optimizes it.

Select Best Web Hosting Providers For Your Website

A good hosting provider for your WordPress site can be useful to optimize and improve your site speed. Though investing extra finances on Hosting is expensive, but it works to improve your site and the user experience.

WordPress hosts are companies that store your website data, and as you sign a plan your every content, videos, images, are lodged on a server placed in the data center of your host. They allow you a convenient way to use the data, handle it, and route it to your site visitor.

Choosing the right WordPress host becomes significant to get things running smoothly. Shared Web Hosting offers you improved performance but not remarkable results because you are sharing a hosting slot with different websites on a similar server. As shared hosts are liable to overload their servers, which can affect your site performance. In present times, advanced cloud hosting solutions are offered by Web Hosting providers to their consumers.

Cloud hosting though more expensive compared to shared hosting but the performance of your website gets improved with a cloud hosting plan as there is no need to shift your website to the new hosting provider. But if you are looking to conserve time, managed WordPress hosting is the best option as they manage all the back-end server-based tasks along with extending support. These are normally fine-tuned to operate with WordPress with functions like single-click staging environments and mechanical backups.

Utilize A Content Delivery Network (CDN)

CDN helps in the offloading process of your static resources from the main server such as Javascript, CSS, Files, and Images which speeds up website loading at the user end and frees your main server from this function. CDN providers cache static content that can be sent to an end-user without any processing from their data centers worldwide. When this resource is requested by a user it is loaded from a data center which is nearer to the location of the user. If the host of your server is in New York and there is an Indian visitor, in that case, the CDN provider loads static files from the data center located in Asia.

Set-Up An Excellent Caching Plugin

Caching hugely improves website performance as it is a technique that allows you to store regularly used data points inside “cached memory”. Any following requests for similar content are catered to from the cached memory, thereby speeding up the process of data retrieval.

Installing an active caching plugin helps to create a copy of your website inside a different folder in a completely static for. Try to decrease calls to the server of your blog, and when a site visitor lands on your site then in place of displaying original page plugin exhibit them a cached variant of a page. This curtails database calls, and excessive HTTP and PHP requests. By incorporating HTTP and service-side caching an immense improvement in your website performance.

Stop Loading Of JavaScript

You have to defer the loading of larger files such as JavaScript to ensure that your other content can load fast. Your WordPress site needs to have a plugin that enables deferred loading of JavaScript.

Utilize Asynchronous Loading of JavaScript And CSS Files

After minifying and combining some of the files, you can optimize the manner of its loading.on your webpages. If your JavaScript and CSS load synchronously, they get loaded singularly in the sequence on which they appear on the page. In asynchronously loading, some of the scripts are simultaneously loaded.

Asynchronous loading speeds up the pages because of a browser while loading a page shifts from top to below. If it receives a file that is synchronous, it stops loading until that particular file has been completely loaded. In the case of an asynchronous file, the browser continues loading different components of the page simultaneously.

Include An Expires Header

When a user accesses your website, the browser of the visitor downloads every file from your server to the device of the site visitor. Expires header fixes an expire duration for your static content. If you activate expire header for static resources then as the visitor visits your site for the second time, the browser does not download the same content and exhibits resources from the first visit it is not expired.

Images Need To Be Optimized

Images are an essential feature of every webpage, are heaviest, and raises page engagement. Being heavy to store, Images slows down your website loading and makes your visitor leave your website as your site takes time to load.

A picture speaks more than a thousand words. You must define the image dimension, medium, and images of large dimensions as well as specify thumbnail images. Every theme contains its individual image size and selecting medium and large settings forms an image that cannot be utilized by posts. There are excellent free plugins like Short Pixel and Imagify that can compress a 7 MB folder containing image into 3.5 MB. Imagify is perfect for JPG images, while Short Pixel is remarkable for PNG files.

JPG is normally the best alternative for photos as it applies lossy compression, which results in data loss of an image when stored in such format. Though cannot be detected by viewers in photos this data loss leads to a smaller size of the file compared to several image file type. So if your pages are uploaded with numerous photos make it JPGs as it decreases load times without harming its appearance. PNG file size is bigger than JPG and if you require clear line PNG can suffice as it is the perfect option for screenshots, detailed graphics, and logos.

Along with proper image sizes plus formats, also make sure that the implementation of the code is also properly done. More specifically, make it certain to evade empty image src codes.

Decrease The Response Time Of Server

The time consumed by your DNS lookup affects the quick loading of your page. A DNS or domain name system contains a database of IP addresses and their related hostnames. A user, typing a URL into the browser, finds it translated into the IP address by a DNS server that shows its online location.

Server response time indicates the time that elapses between a client asking for a page in a browser and the response of the server towards that request. It is gauged by TTFB (Time to First Byte) which represents the milliseconds taken to obtain the first-byte o the page after dispatching an HTTP request.

Studies have shown that above 40% of web audiences abandon a website if it consumes more than 3 seconds duration to load. A higher loading time worsens the ranking on the search engine result page (SERP). Response time affects both your user experience and SEO. This is a solid reason as to why you should check your server response time and improve it. Google suggests you target response time of fewer than 200 milliseconds. A 100ms TTFB is ideal and one exceeding 500ms is a problem. It is noteworthy that this time remains the same for all users irrespective of their geographical positions.

Minify Webpage Scripts

Minification means reducing code size which is done by removing unwanted long variables, characters, and comments. JavaScript, CSS and external files constitute a web age and determine the manner in which it serves quickly. Minifying technique and compression of scripts is a popular method of managing files and stores huge amounts of available data without compromising performance.

Allocate CSS and JS files as internal or external, depending on its size and value. Upgrade the loading time by placing internally small files, as a component of the HTML file. Lastly, keep files convenient to cache by retaining them as external.

Final Thoughts

More than 35.2% of Web is at present powered by WordPress. Though terrific this also means that there are numerous plugins, themes and technical systems that will also coexist. Following the mentioned WordPress site optimization techniques an everyday user of WordPress can get rid of the bottlenecks and troubleshoot their problems and take steps to improve their own WordPress websites.

Join our mailing list

Bringing ideas to life OR more life to your ideas?

Wbcom Designs is a group of experienced people working under one roof having Multiple skills – WordPress, BuddyPress, Woo Commerce, LMS, Membership with WordPress, Job Portal, Multisite and Market Place.